Our study uses a qualitative comparative analysis method in order to assess the impact of national accreditation schemes and also other relevant features of the higher education systems of 20 OECD countries on quality of the higher education sector measured by world rankings of national higher education systems. The analysis shows that higher…

University students, especially language learners, have increasingly been using machine translation (MT) systems in the last decade and for all kinds of texts, including homework, assignments and exams. This ubiquity does not translate into visibility as few teachers address the subject in class. Several researchers have shown that MT systems,…

The calibration of test materials generally involves the interaction between empirical analysis and expert judgement. This paper explores the extent to which scale familiarity might affect expert judgement as a component of test validation in the calibration process. It forms part of a larger study that investigates the alignment of the…

In this study, we investigate the growth trajectory of 519 students in a vocational senior high school in Taiwan. The group-based trajectory model identifies 3 subgroups with distinct trajectories of academic achievement in Math and English. This study reveals baseline predictive factors associated with these trajectories as well as relationships…

In many societies, single-sex education is embedded in a culture that maintains women subordination with possible ramifications to their language performance and role in society. This paper seeks to explain the cultural grounds for Palestinian female direct refusals in their L1 culture and the consequences for their linguistic behaviour in…

As universities in the Anglophone world attend to operating on a global stage, linguistic diversity in the sector has intensified. Historically, higher education has adopted language-as-problem orientations to managing linguistic diversity, viewing multilingual repertoires largely as an obstacle. An emerging body of work informed by…

Executives in the private and government sectors are alike in that they place a major emphasis on communication skills. However, there has never been any research done to investigate communication apprehension (CA) among Thai executives, especially to compare their CA when using Thai (L1) and English (L2). As a result, this study investigated the…